Featured Essays Spider-Noir Where Spider-Noir Fails To Live Up To Its Genre — And Where It Succeeds Age-of-Streaming-and-Smartphone foibles aside, there’s a lot of what’s good about noir in the Spider show. By Ellery Weil | Published on June 10, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share I knew the minute this show walked in the door. It had killer legs—eight of them, to be specific. The kind of show you watched, whiskey in hand, on a dark night in this crazy town. But what I didn’t expect, in giving this wild, mixed-up show a chance, was where it would take me. I’m speaking, of course, of Spider-Noir. One of the latest additions to the sprawling canon of Spider-Man-inspired media, although not part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the show debuted on Amazon Prime with not one, but two viewing options: black and white, or “True-Vue Color.” Starring Nicolas Cage as the titular arachnid, the show bills itself not only as another adventure with everyone’s favorite crime-fighting web-slinger, but as a way to introduce less familiar viewers to the noir genre. It’s fun. It’s flashy. It’s a refreshingly novel Spider adventure. But as a tribute to, or recreation of, classic noir media, it stumbles.  For a show so enamored of classic noir that there are arguments to be made that you shouldn’t watch it colorized, it seems to shy away, visually, when it comes to camerawork. Noir as a genre is full of shadows and angles, of the half-seen character or image appearing under the brim of a hat, in the glow of a midnight streetlight, in the rain. Spider-Noir, by contrast, faces itself dead-on. Characters are positioned directly in front of the camera, lit attractively, but without any of the ambiguity that the deep shadows of a noir film mark out. The whole show, with a few key exceptions, is just a little too bright, missing just a touch of visual ambiguity. As with the lighting, so goes the blocking. There’s a pivotal scene early in the series, where Nic Cage’s Ben Reilly, private eye and secret Spider, sees a lounge act by performer Cat Hardy. Rather than the intimate, low-ceilinged club that a genuine 1940s noir would utilize, Hardy is performing in a venue just shy of Radio City Music Hall. Moreover, rather than Reilly watching her from off one side, with an emphasis on his status as a “face in the crowd,” the camera zeroes in on Reilly’s face, directly, as the crowd seemingly fades away, leaving him and Hardy the only ones in the room. It certainly speaks to a point, but it’s far from the noir tradition. In fact, many of the dead-on, perfectly centered shots in Spider-Noir seem less noir and more “made for streaming.” Notoriously, Netflix’s original content has a distinct “look” that’s intended to make it easier to watch on smaller devices, or while slightly distracted, and sometimes it seems Spider-Noir falls into the same patterns, at the expense of its genre. This is likely, as with Netflix, also serving another purpose: to make cropping for social media ads easier, even at the expense of more interesting shots. This is not, however, to say that Spider-Noir is a failure, either as a work of television or as a tribute to the noir genre. It’s neither. In fact, as television, I personally call it a hit. The plot moves along nicely, the characters are compelling, and the whole project feels fresh, with touches of comedy to leaven the action. As a tribute to noir, or even as a straight-up noir project, it may not hit every target, but when it makes the mark, it does so joyfully. Take, for instance, the character of Janet Ruiz, Ben Reilly’s secretary. What a dame! That is to say, a charming take from Karen Rodriguez on the competent, wise-cracking side character who has no time for a noir hero’s moping, even as they help them crack the case. It’s a tradition with such iconic members as Lee Patrick’s Effie Perrine in The Maltese Falcon, Lucille Ball’s Kathleen Stewart in The Dark Corner, and even Thelma Ritter’s Stella in Rear Window, and Rodriguez does it more than justice. Similar kudos to anything and everything to do with the “scoop” reporter Robbie Robertson, played with flair by Lamorne Morris. Image: Prime Video Visually, there are things Spider-Noir does right as well. Shots where the camera is positioned at an angle give a feel that’s part noir, part comic book panel. Pre-episode recaps are pleasingly zippy, and the costumes are beautifully done, with a just-slightly-exaggerated style that recalls vintage media rather than vintage day-to-day clothes. It works well enough that I’ve found myself wondering where I could get my own greedy mitts on some of Cat Hardy’s outfits which, not coincidentally, is a feeling I’ve felt while watching films from the ‘30s and ‘40s. I even like the color palette, for those who choose the True-Vue option, done in a slightly saturated way that does recall colorized film rather than something shot in color. The other aspect where Spider-Noir does its genre justice is in its comedic touches. While “noir” may literally refer to darkness, the genre is very different from the self-consciously gritty aesthetic sometimes erroneously referred to as “grimdark.” While characters may be caught in a jam, or have fallen in with the wrong crowd on the wrong side of the tracks, the films aren’t meant to feel heavy, or unhappy, and neither does Spider-Noir.  When Cage’s Reilly is impersonating a member of a non-existent “Benevolent Society” and repeatedly punctuates his sentences with “yeah, see?” he’s doing so to question, and eventually threaten, a witness, but it’s also legitimately and intentionally funny. There’s a lightness to his relationship with a local, cap-wearing, streetwise newsboy, to say nothing of Janet Ruiz’s bribing bank tellers with burgers, or Robbie Robertson’s not-so-secret notes to Reilly in the paper. It all recalls some of Sam Spade’s best wisecracks, and provides a welcome note of difference between Spider-Noir and, for instance, Zack Snyder’s take on Watchmen, where there were plenty of noir-inspired visuals, but the complex plot would have made levity a challenge at any rate. And maybe any modern noir was always going to have its differences from the classics of the form. Styles come to be as a result of their time and place; noir came to prominence in the 1930s and 40s as the result of the Great Depression, and postwar fatigue felt on a global scale. While modern people might see parallels between those times and our own, they are not the same. Maybe we aren’t faithfully, perfectly recreating a vintage film style because, artistically, we can’t; the world has moved on, and we’re different now.  More to the point, does it matter? The question of whether Spider-Noir lives up to the noir genre it bills itself as might be less important than the question of whether it’s something worth making, and worth watching.  And that’s a much easier question to answer: in a word, yes. Spider-Noir is good, and both noir fans and neophytes will have a good time watching it. While it may not be a beat-for-beat tribute to classic noir, it recognizes not just what makes the genre “cool,” but what makes it fun. As I’ve written about before, it works because, between the Hoovervilles and World War One veterans that populate the show, the gangsters and artists and blackmailers our heroes encounter, it takes its time, place, and genre seriously, while not being so self-serious that it lacks a spark. So go watch it, see?[end-mark] The post Where <i>Spider-Noir</i> Fails To Live Up To Its Genre — And Where It Succeeds appeared first on Reactor.